The present invention relates to mobiles, and, more particularly, it relates to soft, laminated mobile characters for use with nursery mobiles or as associated nursery items. It also relates to the method for making such mobile characters.
Mobiles are common nursery accessories, and there are a number of types of mobiles. There are switch-activated, motor driven ones (see, for example, Marcus U.S. Pat. No. 3,927,482 assigned to the sama assignee as the present invention), there are sound-activated, motor driven ones (see Hyman U.S. Pat. No. 4,207,696), there are ones driven by a wound helical spring (see U.S. Pat. No. 3,060,628), and there are mobiles which require hand or wind movement for any rotation to occur. The one thing that these mobiles have, by definition, in common is that they have suspended objects that move upon activation.
Nursery mobiles generally are crib-mounted and have as the suspended objects some type of character, such as inanimate characters, caricatures of animals or story book characters or the like. In the past those characters have usually been made of wood, ceramics, or molded plastic. All of these items are relatively hard and rigid and present some danger to an infant advanced enough to pull himself up in the crib while the mobile is rotating. While soft, cloth mobile characters have been used previously, it is believed that any such characters were of the hand-sewn variety. Sewn cloth characters require labor intensive manufacturing processes and do not represent an economical way to avoid the dangers of relatively hard mobile characters.
Accordingly, the need exists for a soft, safe mobile character and for a fast and efficient method for producing such mobile characters.